The article deals with the problematic marginal zones of philological research. Risk zones related to the object, research methods, and terminology of interdisciplinary paradigm of humanities are shown.
In the article the mythological image and mythological metaphor are considered as an initial stage in the development of metaphor as a cognitive mechanism of sense formation.
The author proceeds from the premise that key words are textual operators providing the translation of information from the factual level to the conceptual one. The mechanism of the reader’s interpretation of the text based on key words is described on the example of the story by V. Dragunsky A red balloon in the blue sky. The hermeneutic function of key words renders it possible to consider them a tool of the cognitive poetics of perception.
